In Chicago last August, the Democratic Party staged the version of itself it prefers: lights on cue, music in major keys, speeches polished for unity. For those of us who organized the Uncommitted campaign, the absence onstage told the real story.
In the fall of 2023, I was pitching stories to mainstream media outlets about antiwar protests and how Muslim, Arab, and young voters were souring on the Democratic Party over Joe Biden’s Israel policy. Meanwhile, at Thanksgiving, several of my own relatives told me outright this would be the first election where they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the Democrat at the top of the ticket. Around the same time, a producer at a major network told me that soon I’d have a harder time getting Gaza stories on air, because by January “everything will be about the election.”
That was the strategic dilemma. We knew mass mobilizations, marches, and campus protests had moral power, but inside the party they weren’t treated as political power. Most party elites, mainstream media journalists, and the White House itself didn’t believe Gaza would matter in November; they thought the issue would fade and that the anger was confined to young, leftist activists “who are always mad about something.” So the challenge was to make it political in the language the party does understand: votes and elections.
We first explored whether a progressive primary challenger to Biden might emerge from the ranks of elected officials, celebrities, unions, or activists. Every avenue came up empty. Most people felt like it was career suicide. Then we remembered a precedent: Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008 had used the “Uncommitted” line on the Michigan ballot to signal dissent against Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was available.
We took that option and built it into a grassroots campaign with about $200,000 — tiny by presidential campaign standards but enough to get a message across. The logic was straightforward: use the primaries to register dissent in the most legible currency the party understands, convert those votes into delegates, and turn that presence into leverage for a course correction on Gaza. “Abandon Biden” campaigns were already underway, but they didn’t fit our theory of change, which was that the party needed to save lives in Gaza in order to save democracy from Donald Trump.
The work was far from simple. It meant thousands of conversations with disaffected voters, constant pushback that it was “pointless,” and accusations of disloyalty from every wing of American politics at every turn. Yet the results began to accumulate. In Michigan, more than one hundred thousand Democrats — roughly 13 percent — marked “Uncommitted.” In Minnesota, it was nearly one in five. Across several states, even with the option unavailable on most ballots, those votes translated into close to thirty delegates. What looked improbable at the outset had started to become a visible bloc inside the party.
Our thesis was straightforward. We set out to forge a permission structure that would change the top of the ticket’s policy and then let Biden (and then Kamala Harris) win back antiwar voters whom the White House’s weapons policy had driven out of the tent. That required pressure with a carrot and a stick. The carrot was obvious: hundreds of thousands were ready to return if Biden (and then Harris) drew daylight from a blank-check policy and put US weapons under United States and international law. The stick was equally clear: this bloc was organized, visible, and not going away. We carried two obligations at once: push to stop US weapons from being used to commit war crimes in Gaza in order to unite the party to defeat Donald Trump. Our task was to make a pivot toward both possible, credible, and safe.
But we weren’t running against Biden, Harris, or the Democratic Party. Most of the Uncommitted delegates were longtime Democratic Party organizers. We were Democrats trying to warn them. The coalition had a fracture, plain as the polling on Biden’s age or the price of groceries. But as with those concerns, party leaders brushed them aside — sometimes by looking the other way, sometimes with a condescending sneer.
We came to the Democratic National Convention with American doctors who had walked bombed hospital corridors of Gaza, who had pulled shrapnel stamped “Made in USA” from the bodies of Palestinian toddlers. They carried testimony, not politics — moral witness to what the world was already beginning to call war crimes, even as Democratic Party leaders refused to. And yet in a press conference, after they described these scenes, the question from mainstream reporters was whether they thought Harris or Trump would be better. The question felt surreal: as if the point of their witness was partisan calculus, not the human cost they had just laid bare.
Alongside them, we carried a list of steps the Harris campaign could have taken before November: sit with Palestinian and Lebanese American families in Michigan who had lost loved ones; draw daylight from a blank-check weapons policy; say out loud that American weapons must not be used to break American and international law; allow a Palestinian American voice on the stage of a party that claims to speak for multiethnic democracy in the face of fascism and racism.
Every request we made was denied, except for one: the DNC agreed to host the first official convention panel on Palestinian human rights, which became one of the most heavily attended events of the week. But even DNC officials admitted to us directly that the panel was not our main ask and could not substitute for a Palestinian speaker onstage. That acknowledgment mattered: it showed they knew exactly what we were asking for, and that they knew this wasn’t it.
The Harris campaign’s posture was even clearer. In private conversations after the convention, when questions of endorsement were raised, its position was essentially, we understand if you don’t endorse. It was a polite way of saying the campaign wasn’t going to change its approach and that they did not want — or need — our support.
For two months, we sent the DNC names of Palestinian American leaders rooted in this party. Members of Congress supplemented their own names. To our knowledge, not a single Palestinian American elected official was called. Not a single draft of a speech was asked for. Not one word was invited onto the party’s convention stage.
On the Wednesday night of the convention, around 7 p.m., the decision finally came: “It’s not happening.” Uncommitted delegates and allied Harris delegates began a sit-in at the United Center. From 8:30 p.m. to nearly 4 a.m., senior staff rotated through with offers of meetings — with senior DNC and Harris staff, with congressmen and senators — but never about the one thing that mattered.
We were told the vetting didn’t go through. Later we were told our movement could not “define the vice president’s biggest speech of her life.” At another point we heard that any Palestinian American we proposed had used the word “genocide,” and that alone made them “nonstarters because it caused offense to Jewish Democrats.” The explanations shifted, but they all missed the point. The issue wasn’t the logistics of vetting — it was the fear of a Palestinian voice itself. And if the party was so afraid of even symbolic inclusion, how could anyone believe it would ever take on the harder work of policy change? Allies saw the contradiction immediately. Major unions, members of Congress, relatives of Israeli hostages, and even liberal Jewish groups urged the DNC to allow a Palestinian speaker.
For many older black Democratic leaders, the symbolism was what cut especially deep. They were caught between celebrating the historic moment of the first black woman nominee and watching Palestinians barred from the stage for who they were, not for what they might say. The memory of Fannie Lou Hamer’s exclusion in 1964 hung in the air. The Democratic Party, once again, was broadcasting who counted and who did not — and that contradiction dramatized the stakes more clearly than any speech we could have given.
All year, we heard the same message from voters Democrats count as their coalition — Muslims and Arabs and many young people across backgrounds. They said they could not vote for a party they believed was arming and defending a catastrophe that international bodies were investigating as genocidal. By November 2023, polling in Michigan made the drift plain among Arab, Muslim, and young voters. Inside donor and media rooms, the confident reply was that a debate between Trump and Biden would bring everyone “home” against the Muslim-ban candidate. And what a debate that was.
Coalitions and party unity depend on trust, and the Democratic Party’s history makes that clear. In 1964, civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party arrived in Atlantic City without numbers or money but with enormous moral authority. They demanded that the national party seat black delegates from Mississippi instead of the all-white delegation that had been sent by the state party. The party did not concede to their demands, but their presence cracked the door open. Within a few years, black Democrats were inside the party structure, reshaping who had standing in the coalition. They lost in the moment, but they created the conditions for a future realignment.
Uncommitted was modeled far more on 1964 than on 1968. We hadn’t set out to stage a sit-in, and we never intended one. Our aim was not to rage from the outside but to walk through the gates with the tools the party itself provides — ballots, delegates, media, convention seats — and force it to confront what it preferred to ignore. Street protest can stir the conscience, but without a ledger of votes and leaders at the table to forge a new path, conscience alone is too easily dismissed. And yet in Chicago, we collided with the truth that a convention is no longer a forum for democratic argument but a spectacle of control. It is choreography masquerading as deliberation, a stage set to display a script while banishing dissent to the wings.
The deeper problem was a democratic deficit. In a presidential election year, there was no meaningful way to force accountability on the party, no lever that could compel leaders to hear our voices or adjust course. The convention was stage-managed, primaries were designed to ratify more than to debate, and the big donors and outside groups were already setting the boundaries of “acceptable” dissent. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) openly pledged to spend $100 million — much of it Republican money — to oust antiwar candidates in Democratic primaries.
One night after the convention, a senior Democratic insider took us aside and described being in a gathering at the convention with the people who “really run” the party — its top funders, strategists, and operatives. Two-thirds of them, he said, were tied to AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI)’s networks. “And they were never going to let a Palestinian American on that stage,” the operative said. That’s the imbalance. Our movement had the moral energy of protests but not the institutional muscle: no donor or voter or elected network to rival theirs, no deep bench of operatives, few electoral victories, not a Washington presence strong enough to shift the balance.
Other party insiders were blunt to us. Most Democrats in Congress didn’t oppose US weapons for Israel, and any daylight would have triggered immediate backlash from swing-state moderates. They said, imagine John Fetterman or prominent Jewish leaders on TV accusing Kamala Harris of “abandoning Israel,” backed by suburban Democrats warning that the election was at risk. In their eyes, that coalition of voters, donors, and elected officials was larger — and more decisive — than ours.
I will not pretend Chicago left no mark. While the hall danced to pop songs, my phone lit with messages from delegates bracing for censure by their local and state parties back home, punished for saying aloud what their state and local parties wanted left unsaid. The labels came quickly — “terrorist sympathizer” and “antisemite” from the Right, “Russian asset” from the center, “sellout” from parts of the Left for trying to fight inside the party at all. It was humiliating, and it was exhausting. The hardest part was the loneliness of returning with no policy win to hold, only the burden of the struggle — its grief, its arguments, its unrelenting weight, and the conflicting theories of change from those within the antiwar tent.
But what stays with me are the faces of our Palestinian and Jewish delegates who would not move. Democratic Party delegates with red eyes from sleepless nights, shoulders squared against the weight of rejection, yet carrying themselves with the power that comes from knowing you are right. They sat not in anger but in conviction: that to exclude a Palestinian voice from the Democratic Party’s stage not because of what might be said but because of who would say it was a moral wrong too grave to accept. Their stillness was a kind of defiance. Their persistence, a declaration that dignity, once denied, does not quietly retreat.
That night clarified for me what politics at its most honest really is — not the bright lights or the speeches sanded smooth for unity, but ordinary people risking censure, humiliation, even a form of political exile, to insist that their grief be seen. The sit-in was weary, it was painful, and it was real. And in those faces I saw the lesson: power without conscience breeds injustice, but conscience without power is a sermon no one hears.
Yes, some Arab and Muslim Americans voted for Donald Trump. So did some right-leaning, pro-Israel Jewish voters who felt that the Left had become antisemitic. That isn’t symmetry. It’s alienation, expressed in different ways. In each case, people felt dismissed by institutions they once trusted. Trump became a blunt instrument — a way to punish a party they believed would not hear them. You don’t have to think he cares about you; you only have to believe he rattles the people who won’t acknowledge your pain.
Uncommitted didn’t elect Trump. Ignoring the Democrats who checked off the “Uncommitted” ballot helped create an opening he exploited. We warned our base about Project 2025, urged against third-party detours, and even ran ads to that effect. What we couldn’t do was give a formal endorsement and hand our field operation to a campaign that shockingly refused even basic recognition; that would have torched our credibility in the communities we organize and damaged the relationships we need to build durable power.
After the convention, a group of senior Democratic operatives — frustrated by the party’s drift on Israel-Palestine — met with us and laid out a simple forecast. If Harris won, Benjamin Netanyahu would test her in the lame-duck window or the first one hundred days; her response would set the tone for the term. The question wasn’t abstract: Would she spend scarce early political capital on a public break with Netanyahu, and did she have the “war room” infrastructure to absorb AIPAC/DMFI attacks the way Obama’s team did during the Iran-deal fight?
These party insiders were extremely skeptical that Harris would break with Biden or Netanyahu in a major way without being pushed in that direction from outside and within (donors, voters, networks of leaders). What they saw in Uncommitted was the beginnings of that infrastructure: a multifaith, multiracial, multi-issue coalition — Left and center left, elected officials and community leaders, Black, Jewish, Arab, Muslim, Christian, with major labor unions — that could speak the party’s language to create both cover and pressure for a real shift on weapons transfers.
The lesson isn’t that protest fails. It’s that protest without power hits a ceiling. Moral clarity must be translated into leverage — votes, donors, validators, and a multiracial and multifaith network that includes labor, black institutions, and Latino organizations. Primaries are where that leverage is built. If party elites respond to money and votes, movements must organize both. The alternative is the democratic deficit we saw up close: a stage managed for a false sense of unity, boundaries set by outside money, and no reliable channel for accountability in a presidential year.
Looking back, I keep returning to one hard truth: too many on the center-left did not do what the moment required. They mistook access for influence, statements for strategy, partisanship and proximity for power. From a middling position between Netanyahu and AIPAC on one side and the ceasefire movement on the other, they hoped a careful, triangulating sentence could stand in for public pressure. They told themselves they were holding the line; in fact, they held the coat. The White House and the campaign needed to feel pressure from within as well as concern. Instead, they buried their heads and called it pragmatism. It was always five minutes to midnight. And restraint without leverage produced exactly what it always does: policy that moved too little, too late, and a politics that left the most wounded parts of the coalition to fend for themselves.
A year ago, the message was clear: challenge US policy on Gaza, and you risk your seat. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush paid that price. What’s changed since then is not that the moral case has grown stronger — it was always strong — but that the political risk has shifted. Zohran Mamdani’s victory showed that standing up for Palestinian rights could survive contact with the electorate, even in one of the most Jewish constituencies in the country. That win cracked the narrative of inevitability, and with it the fear.
As with the Iraq War, few will ever be held accountable; soon the story will be that everyone was always against it, or that it was “justified at the beginning and then lost its way” — a soothing fiction that allows leaders and institutions to preserve themselves while erasing the people who paid a real price.
Politics at its truest is not the light show; it is the faces that refuse to be erased. A party that claims to speak for the many must do more than applaud itself under a bright stage. It must listen. In the end, Biden and Harris lost antiwar voters for the same reason they lost voters upset about the economy and Biden’s age: they simply did not listen to what voters were telling them. Democrats can treat Uncommitted as a trespass to punish, or as a map back to a coalition built on recognition, reciprocity, and shared purpose. We chose the map. The door is still open for those willing to walk through it.
Great Job Waleed Shahid & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
